As a result of the 2008 election and everything that has gone on for the last two years, conservatives have been very focused on the 2010 and 2012 elections. And while that is entirely appropriate and necessary, I believe we must recognize that liberal politicians are only a symptom of the illness. The illness is the liberal media.

Our efforts to win the elections in 2010 and 2012 will be, at best, a temporary solution if we don't deal with the underlying infection which is the corrupt leftist media which has clearly become little more than a propaganda machine--if not for the Democrat party, for leftist ideology.

Although it's been very clear for years--even decades--that the media is liberal, the level of their journalistic malpractice has usually only been detectable anecdotally or statistically. We could perceive the bias and we could often measure the bias statistically, but hard evidence of intent was often missing.

No longer.

A group of liberal journalists in 2008 sought to sweep under the rug the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal that threatened to derail then-Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller, an online publication founded by Tucker Carlson, a conservative contributor for Fox News.

The documents offer evidence to conservative critics who have long held that the mainstream media were in the tank for Obama, and bolsters the argument that reporters with major news outlets are biased in their coverage.

Journalists working for Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic expressed outrage over the tough questioning Obama received from ABC anchors Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos at a debate and some of them plotted to protect Obama from the swirling controversy, according to the Daily Caller.

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent pressed his fellow journalists to deflect attention from Obama's relationship with Wright by shifting topics to one of Obama's conservative critics, the Daily Caller reported.

"What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear."

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us."

The fact that the media is severely left-leaning comes as no surprise to conservatives. However, at least in my case, a concerted effort to protect a presidential candidate is the kind of thing I would have previously attributed only to cynicism and conspiracy theory. Now it's established reality. The above demonstrates a concerted effort to defend the left and attack the right. And the "no matter what we choose" is indefensible: In other words, they don't care what the truth is--it's a matter of how they choose to spin the story!

This demonstrates that while conservatives must win elections in 2010 and 2012, we must also address the underlying problem: the media.

If the media had done its job, it's entirely likely Obama would not have been elected. Instead, since 2006, the media was actively participating in building up Obama and then, as detailed in the article above, protecting the candidate they had built. Is it any wonder we had dozens of reporters rummaging around in the garbage of Gov. Palin in Alaska, but we still know very, very little about Obama's history in the political septic tank that is Chicago?

The leftists in the media chose their candidate, built him, protected him, and got him elected.

The Real Battle: The Media

A dysfunctional media is not just an annoying political inconvenience in a democracy. It's the kiss of death.

We don't have a leftist media because we have leftist politicians.
We have leftist politicians because we have a leftist media.

Politics is perception, and the perception most people have of politics comes from the media. With the media so clearly in the tank for leftists, it's quite frankly a miracle conservatives ever win public office at the state or national level. Conversely, leftist politicians need this kind of corrupt media to flourish--and even with the corrupt media, they often lose.

This clearly explains why, in poll after poll, Americans consider themselves conservatives yet we have Democrats in power. Even in some of the most liberal states on the east coast, a plurality of citizens consider themselves conservatives--yet they vote for leftists. Why? Very probably because the media is shaping their views of policies and candidates. Every state in America is a "red" state based on the self-identified ideology of its citizens. If Americans voted according to their beliefs, we'd virtually never see a leftist elected. Even in New England.

So when conservatives in New England are electing leftists, we must pause and consider why that is. A common response is that the leftists are simply better at communicating. Although that's superficially true, what it really comes down to is that leftists are good at tricking citizens into voting for them even though the citizens don't share their ideology. And the reason why leftists are good at tricking citizens into voting for them is because they have fellow leftists in the media that, like in the evidence offered above, are protecting liberal candidates rather than engaging in hard-hitting journalism that would otherwise expose them.

If we want to restore our country, we can't limit our attention to the political arena. We can defeat leftist after leftist in election after election, but the media will just make more (kind of like Doritos).

We must address the cancer that is today's liberal media.

Focusing on the Media

The problem, clearly, is that the liberal media is no longer about journalism, much less reporting the truth. It's about propaganda. It's about an agenda. Members of the liberal media are essentially un-elected politicians that have the job of reporting on their fellow elected politicians that share the same leftist ideology.

New media (blogs, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and even email) provides us with the opportunity to circulate news and information without going through the liberal media. But all too often the news and information we circulate comes from the same liberal media that is working against us.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I feel very strongly that we have to figure it out and deal with it. The liberal media is the heart of the multi-headed hydra while politicians are the heads. We can keep cutting heads off the hydra each election, but they're just going to keep growing back until we address the underlying problem.

Americans are conservative. But conservatism will continue to lose ground in America as long as the leftist media is America's primary source of information.

It's time we expand the fight for our country beyond the political sphere. We must no longer accept that a leftist media is just the cards we were dealt. We must reshuffle the deck and recognize that electoral wins are, in the long term, small victories in a war we're losing if the leftist media continues to shape public opinion in favor of leftist Democrats.

And the evidence made public today shows that that's exactly what they're doing.